50 years ago, Khmer Rouge began reigning terror in Cambodia. Justice remains elusive

WARNING: This article contains a discussion of genocide and reference to extreme violence.

It has been 50 years since the carefree childhood of Bokhar Bun Climbing and mischief in Phnom Penh turned into a nightmare. The era in which Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia remains alive in his mind.

His early memories of the hope of citizens will welcome black soldiers, switch to memories of confusion of evacuation in a crosshair in the jungle camps during the hot season of the New Year of Cambodia.

The horror changing life after the horror occurred when the soldiers broke off the families and killed uncritically. Even starving children were punished as traitors for “theft” of fruit or a drink of palm juice from wild, instead of bringing them to joint camps.

“There are many things that … you see, but you can't touch, you can't eat … (because) you don't share food with the rest of the commune”, Bun, who currently lives in the gatineau, que., He remembered Sunday magazine.

One of his sisters was caught in this situation and brutally beaten to the degree of permanent brain damage. He said that his parents and older siblings were forced to watch, but could not intervene. Any challenge would mean to make the whole family.

On April 17, 1975, the beginning of the year was marked with Zero, Khmer Rouge's attempt and its POL leader to “reset” the nation and design them in a new communist society, mercilessly removing the wide votes of Cambodian culture, traditions and people.

Today, survivors and people with connections with Cambodia are thinking about the influence of almost four years of Khmer Rouge's rule-especially how the pursuit of prosecution of Pol Pita and his best leaders helped pave the path of the International Criminal Court.

It is also a reminder of how justice remains elusive.

The promises turned into a disaster

According to Craig Etcheson, who studied intensively, documented and wrote about the Khmer Rouge organization in the mid -1970s, Cambodia was deeply destabilized.

In the neighboring war in Vietnam-Cambodenia, terrorized in particular by previous American bombings attacking bases and supply lines at Viet Cong and supply on their soil-this coffee

Khmer Rouge sold besieged people in his vision of change: “A new kind of communist party that did not make the same mistakes (previous communist parties),” said Entcheson.

Instead, there was a disaster.

The cities were largely abandoned, their inhabitants forced to rural employee crews for radical reconstruction of Cambodia as a classless, common, agrarian society.

The regime closed schools, endured money, ownership of land and traditional family structures, banned religion and destroyed temples and works of art.

The goals of persecution and execution were widespread: ethnic and religious minorities, artists, professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, teachers and everyone remotely recognized the intellectual, including people who wore glasses or were able to speak a foreign language.

“They destroyed Cambodian culture to the roots. They destroyed the country's economy and all its institutions. They dropped out on many land itself,” said Etcheson, who was later the head of the prosecutor's office in the case of extraordinary districts in Cambodia (ECCC) (ECCC) (ECCC), Cambodian and the International Tribunal in 2001.

The regime was removed at the beginning of 1979, but suffering lasted. When the Cambodians worked on the reconstruction of the devastated nation in the 1980s and 1990s, the other members of Khmer Rouge still opposed the government supported by Vietnam.

The role of Canada in international justice

The 90th century was a period of dissolution of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin wall and brutal violence from conflicts in the Balkans and Rwanda.

In addition to these events, however, there was a new collegiality in the landscape of foreign policy – and an impulse to build the International Tribunal for resolving war crimes, genocide and crime against humanity, reminds Lloyd Axworthy, who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada in 1996–2000.

Against this background, the United States approached Canada in 1997 with the proposal: “Snatch-And-Grab Mission for Pol Pot” before inventing the “competent lawsuit” for the leader of Khmer Rouge, said Etcheson.

Canada was used as a potential partner because of the law, allowing extradition and/or prosecution of accused people of war crimes or crimes against humanity. Axworthy said that after a comprehensive legal analysis, Canada refused.

“At that time, caution was a word,” said Axworthy.

But another factor was Canada Failed case against Imre FinalHe added. . The Hungarian police captain in the World War Era in Canada After convicting at home, for help in sending thousands of Jews to concentration camps.

“There was a whole idea of ​​bringing (Pol Pot) and I regret it … But I learned from it,” said Axworthy. “And I think it gave us an even greater impulse to get involved in the development of the International Criminal Court.”

The following year, Pol Pot died for natural reasons in the Thai Gambress border, and the Statute of the Rome-which was established by the International Criminal Court-the stone-up adopted by member nations around the world.

Axworthy describes the court as an important first step in “establishing a stronger rule of law and around this personal principle of personal, individual responsibility” – compared to the liability of the state – for the most serious international crimes.

He hoped that this could still discourage future cruelty, he said.

If the court had already been established, Pol Pot could be detained and “brought to a place like Haga”, Axworthy thought. “The court actually gives us a vehicle we didn't have.”

Around the same time, the leadership of Cambodia-the help of the UN-began to go forward, which would be a long-term process of trying higher-level members Khmer Rouge.

Retired police curator in Ottawa Isobel Granger I already had other international peacekeeping missions and investigations at its lane, when in 2015 the nickname sergeant was assigned to Cambodia. There she conducted interviews with survivors, gathered physical evidence, which still appeared decades later, and mapped criminal places to build the strongest possible case towards survivors who gave orders.

She was often the first person to whom many survivors have ever opened about this era.

One woman was reluctant to share a long -term story about being uncomfortable in leaving behind, because there was no place on the truck. Later she learned that she had escaped on a trip to the killing fields.

Granger remembered another conversation, which made the man in the 1950s rolled up like a little boy, absorbed in his memories.

Granger, who also went to Rwanda and stood before the burial places in Kigali, said that it is important that people reconcile with what people who experienced the genocide experienced.

“The seed of civilization is very thin,” she said. “People should, if they can, go to these places to see what can happen when we don't see each other as human beings.”

Justice “rather elusive concept”

After Khmer Rouge Cambodia was led for decades by Hun Sen, a one -time commander of Khmer Rouge, who later escaped. He still manages the country's senate, although his son took the position of prime minister in 2023.

In some respects, Hun Sen allowed international investigators with surprising access over the years, said Etcheson, but sleeping and again integrated Khmer Rouge members in Cambodian society, he also hindered efforts to prosecute outside a handful of the best brass of this movement.

Ecc finally sentenced three officials before the end of the Tribunal in 2022.

Justice, she noticed Etcheson, “is a rather elusive concept.”

“The whole process (judicial) was something like a great, socio-political experiment to find out how much justice we can get in Cambodia. And we learned: some. Not so many people wanted.”

– How do you find justice?

After returning to Gatineau, Bokhar Bun repeated Granger's sentiments that people must remember the atrocities recorded in his homeland.

Over the four years of Khmer Rouge's reign, about 1.5 million to two million people – at that time, a quarter of the Cambodia population – was made or dead because of hunger, malnutrition or illness.

“You have learned from day to day to survive and you are still afraid of you that you will be called to perform,” said Bun. “If you hear your name, (you are) dead.”

He remembers how he stumbles in a ditch hidden under a densely spoken mango tree filled with bodies. The young man was supposed to use cattle, and one pulled him into him.

Fearing that he would be discovered in a ghostly place, he immediately climbed, pulling the cow with him to find water in which he could wash his blood.

“This is a murder of another man without remorse. … This is the most afraid of the most: that this story can come back,” he said.

Cambodia became “the worst hell on earth,” he said.

“So how do you find justice? We lost everything.”